Via CNN: McCain broadens definition of surge
The Arizona senator told reporters Wednesday afternoon that when he refers to the surge, it encompasses not just the January 2007 increase in troop levels but also the counter-insurgency that started in Iraq’s Al Anbar province months prior.
“A surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy, and it’s made up of a number of components,” McCain said. “This counter-insurgency was initiated to some degree by Colonel McFarland in Anbar province, relatively on his own.”
All of this is because
In an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric on Tuesday, McCain said that the surge led U.S. forces to ally with Sunnis, “And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.”
The Obama campaign quickly seized on the discrepancy in the timeline between when the Awakening started and the U.S. later added 30,000 boots on the ground.
While McCain had little choice but to correct his error, I am not sure that he is making all this better for himself. It is true that a variety of changes were made in counter-insurgency policy alongside the increase in troops, but there has been some serious conflation of events, not to mention an impossible causality argument being offered in discussion of these matters.
It almost seems as if McCain wants “surge” to equal “whatever good has happened in the Iraq in the last two years” and oh, by the way, did you know that he was a major proponent of the “surge”?
Beyond that, saying that “[a] surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy, and it’s made up of a number of components” doesn’t make sense. It is pretty clear that the term “surge” has meant an increase in a number of troops, not some specialized term with a lot of complex elements (indeed, it is a shortened form of “troop surge” and the deployment of additional troops to a given theater can be done for any number reasons and is not a common term used to describe counter-insurgency actions–indeed, prior to 2007 it wasn’t a common term at all). I am not saying that there haven’t been a number of elements involved in Iraq, and I am aware of shifts in counter-insurgency policy in the time period in question, but the notion that the term “surge” has been used in that broad a way is a stretch. It stretches credulity, in fact, to try and apply it in any was to the Anbar Awakening.
McCain’s problem is that he has bought into the party line that the reduction in violence in Iraq was all about the surge. There has never been any acknowledgment from the administration that internal displacement of Sunnis, especially within Baghdad might have something to do with the quelling of Sunni-Shi’a fighting. Nor has there been acknowledgment that the Anbar Awakening was not wholly the result of US actions, but part of the evolution of the political and military position of the Sunnis in that area vis-a-vis AQI. Forget all of that, the party line has been: the surge has lowered violence. Now, it is clear that that surge has helped lower violence, but as Matthew Yglesias1 noted yesterday, the focus of the surge was Baghdad, making the Anbar connection even more problematic:
the surge troops were overwhelmingly sent to increase the level of manpower in Baghdad (i.e., not where the Anbar Awakening happened) and almost certainly (along with a tactical shift to more of a population protection mission) deserves credit for reducing the bloodshed in Baghdad by stabilizing the borders between now-segregated neighborhoods. I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that it had nothing to do what happened in Anbar, but it wasn’t a major factor, and certainly didn’t make anything happen in September 2006.
To be clear: the “Anbar Awakening” took place in middle 2006. The surge started at the beginning of 2007. Indeed, Alex Knapp notes that President Bush used the Anbar Awakening as an argument for sending more troops to Iraq (rather than more troops creating the Awakening) in hisSOTU speech of that year:
Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops. These troops will work with Iraqi and tribal forces to keep up the pressure on the terrorists. America’s men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan — and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq.
In other words, any arguments that the Anbar Awakening was the result of a response by locals to promises of future troops or that it can any way be retroactively be said to have been caused by the surge is absurd. More accurately, the situation in Anbar became one of the arguments for increased troops in Iraq–and again, most of those 30,000 troops went to Baghdad.
McCain is taking perhaps his main area of strength (the idea that he knows best about Iraq, and that his support for the surge proves it) and seriously damaging it. Couple that with the Maliki government basically endorsing Obama’s plan for troops in Iraq, and one has to say that McCain is having a rough time of it at the moment on the topic of Iraq.
I don’t think it can be emphasized enough: if McCain ends up looking like he doesn’t know what he is talking about on Iraq, he is in real trouble.
Sphere: Related Content- h/t: Alex Knapp [↩]
July 24th, 2008 at 9:23 am
McCain is taking perhaps his main area of strength (the idea that he knows best about Iraq, and that his support for the surge proves it) and seriously damaging it. Couple that with the Maliki government basically endorsing Obama’s plan for troops in Iraq, and one has to say that McCain is having a rough time of it at the moment on the topic of Iraq.
I don’t think it can be emphasized enough: if McCain ends up looking like he doesn’t know what he is talking about on Iraq, he is in real trouble.
I am not sure how McCain’s views on Iraq can be considered a strength. Prior to the invasion, he shilled Cheney’s Saadam-Al Quaeda link, made dire arguments about the (nonexistent) WMDs, claimed that the invasion and aftermath would be cakewalk.
On the one major foreign policy disaster of the Bush administration, McCain was an enthusiastic supporter.
Furthermore, his repeated gaffes (al-Quaeda-Iraq link, the weird statement that Pakistan & Iraq share a border, etc…) suggest that he still doesn’t know much about the region.
McCain is showing all of the faults of Bush: inattention to facts, and an inability to admit problems with his own preconceptions.
Where he got the reputation that he is somehow a sage on foreign affairs remains a mystery.
July 24th, 2008 at 9:27 am
That Iraq is considered one of McCain’s strengths shows how weak his overall situation is.
And you make an extremely salient point:
Yup.
July 24th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
More fundamentally, the policy changes in Anbar have been all about undermining the alleged creation of a democratic state in Iraq (both the ‘democratic’ part and the ’state’ part), by empowering the most traditional and antidemocratic elements of Sunni society.
And as alluded to in yesterday’s post, the reduction in violence (which is often over-stated, because US media and politicians really only pay attention to ‘official’ news out of Baghdad) is primarily a result of ethnic cleansing, and not enhanced security, per se. I suppose that is the definition of Victory in Iraq (TM, GOP): The Remaking of the Map of the Middle East (TM, GOP) has succeeded in eliminating mixed villages and neighborhoods in what was once one of the most multiethnic and secular nations in the Middle East.
If McCain wants to claim credit for all that, then let him. But someone had better call him on it.
July 24th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
McCain’s clearly making a tactical mistake here. It would be a much better idea to simply point out that, (1) the Anbar Awakening began, (2) the US noticed and sent 4,000 troops to Anbar to support that, (3) without those troops Anbar would look very different today, and (4) those 4,000 troops are “surge troops.”
July 24th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
A “surge” can mean a strategy where you mass what forces you have and charge a particular target, or set of targets in succession. It does not necessary require more forces, just a change in focus. If the previous strategy was “hold the areas we have” then a surge is simply a change in priority to “mass up and clobber strongholds”.
After all, an ocean surge isn’t caused by more water being added to the ocean, but a focus of the energy in the waves.